Tyson Foods Indicted in Plan To Smuggle Illegal Workers
Tyson Foods is certainly not the regional company it was 40 years ago or the large national company it was just a few decades ago. It’s now a global meat processing and distribution company, and you probably didn’t know that 90% of the pepperoni on frozen pizzas comes from a Tyson company.
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Congratulations, you were able to find one example, from fifteen years ago.
Providence Journal
January 18, 2002
Tyson's Immigrants
Tyson Foods Inc., America's largest meat producer, has a weakness for sharp practices.
When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, where Tyson is based, there were allegations of influence-peddling in the state government, aggravated by the fact that the governor's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, also served as a lawyer for Tyson. When Bill Clinton was president, a Tyson executive was convicted and sent to prison for trying to bribe Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy. (The executive was later pardoned by President Clinton.)
Now comes news that Tyson faces a 36-count federal indictment for reducing costs in its poultry factories by smuggling illegal aliens into the country from Mexico and providing them with fraudulent work papers. The government asserts that Tyson arranged for illegal aliens to be delivered to 15 plants in nine states, and obtained phony documents for the aliens so that they would be legally employable in the counties and states where the Tyson plants were situated.
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The Clinton's and Tyson's Foods Close Bond
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In 1974 as well as 1992, candidate Clinton has actually embraced powerful corporate interests and much of their agenda despite his rhetoric against them. When Clinton ran for Congress in 1974, the largest employer in the Third District of Arkansas was Tyson Foods, based in Springdale, which was well on its way to becoming the nation's largest poultry producer. In 1995, Tyson Foods ranked "110th on the Fortune 500 list, and sold 6,000 products in 57 countries, from fresh chickens to taco fillings," according to an August 1994 company profile in The New York Times.
The chairman, Don Tyson, is a colorful figure who in the late 1970s designed his corporate office as a replica of the Oval Office in the White House, with doorknobs shaped like chicken eggs. Tyson was estimated to be worth $800 million. He supported Clinton in the 1974 race, and according to author David Maraniss, the Tyson family donated a campaign telephone bank which was operated from an apartment near the University of Arkansas, although it should be noted that no such "in-kind" contribution was reported by the campaign to the Federal Election Commission. Clinton never talked much about the company itself publicly, but instead spoke empathetically about the plight of chicken farmers.
The Tyson-Clinton relationship continued in Washington, of course, and it grew out of a special culture. Probably no one has better captured the real essence of the political-financial nexus in Arkansas than journalist Michael Kelly, who wrote that Arkansas "has been ruled for almost all of its existence, and is largely ruled still, by a thin upper crust of Democratic party officials and Democratic legislative leaders and important landholders and businessmen."
"This elite, bound together not by party or even ideology but by mutually advantageous relationships, holds sway over a small and politically disorganized middle class and a large but well-beaten population of the poor.
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AllPolitics - Follow The Money
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Clinton Ties to Tyson Scion Still Drawing Critics' Fire : Politics: Some allege Arkansan got special treatment from Agriculture, Commerce departments. He denies it.
June 12, 1994| SARA FRITZ |
SPRINGDALE, Ark. — He is an unlikely looking millionaire kingmaker--a balding, impish man whose trademark khaki work uniform belies his wealth and power.
Still, Donald Tyson, who succeeded in building his father's small poultry business into a multimillion-dollar food-processing empire, has been widely portrayed as a driving force behind the political ascendancy of Bill Clinton.
Indeed, during the 1992 presidential campaign, Texas billionaire and independent candidate Ross Perot dubbed then-Gov. Clinton "chicken man" because of his close relationship to Tyson and to Arkansas' poultry industry.
And Clinton himself drew attention to the association when he acknowledged to a campaign audience that he had sacrificed the environment in Arkansas to create more jobs for the state's poultry farms.
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Clinton Ties to Tyson Scion Still Drawing Critics' Fire : Politics: Some allege Arkansan got special treatment from Agriculture, Commerce departments. He denies it.
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